


Five Times Deanna Troi Was Her Father's Daughter

by cosmic_llin



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Bilingual Character(s), Character Study, Gen, Languages, Languages and Linguistics, Loss of Parent(s), Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 21:11:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3993040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/pseuds/cosmic_llin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's still with her, all the time.</p>
<p>For glitteratiglue, whose ideas about Deanna inspire me. <3</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Deanna Troi Was Her Father's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glitteratiglue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/gifts).



Her first day at Starfleet Academy, Deanna Troi decides to speak nothing but Federation Standard from now on.

‘But why?’ asks her roommate, Shelitha, when she notices the way Deanna stumbles over tenses, pauses to sort through her vocabulary for the right word. ‘That’s what the Universal Translator’s for.’

Shelitha never bothers to speak anything but her native tongue, one of the five official Andorian languages.

Deanna shrugs. ‘It might be useful, if it ever breaks.’

Shelitha gives her a disbelieving look. ‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘Federation Standard is so terracentric. Why should we all have to learn what’s basically just some old Earth language?’

‘Well, I’m half human,’ says Deanna. ‘It makes more sense for me than it does for you.’

She hasn’t really answered the question, but Shelitha doesn’t press the issue. Deanna almost wishes she would. Then she might say, I feel bad that I let myself get so rusty in my father’s language. She might say, it makes me feel weird when people assume my heritage is entirely Betazoid.

She might even say what she’s hardly said to herself: If I sound like them, I might fit in with them better.

(Never mind that in her Betazoid dialect she’s fluent, with just the barest hint of her father’s offworlder accent, a hint that she’s spent her whole life stubbornly clinging to. It’s not like that fluency ever helped her to fit in there, but that doesn’t mean this time has to be the same.)

But then, she probably wouldn’t say _any_ of this in Federation Standard, because it takes so long to decide exactly how to express things that the conversation has usually moved on by the time she finally opens her mouth.

Those few times that she does cobble together a sentence quickly enough to say it, though, she feels a burst of pride that makes her glad that she came here.

* * *

Sometime during her first assignment, on the Ktarian Starfleet base, Deanna starts thinking about the songs her father used to sing. He was always singing something, while he worked, while they played together. He sang her to sleep at night, sometimes in person and sometimes over subspace when he was away. She would curl up in her mother’s arms and listen to his voice coming to her from the stars.

She doesn’t remember all of the songs now, but she remembers enough snippets that she can find most of them in the historical database. Most of them are traditional Earth songs, hundreds of years old. She goes through a phase of listening to them, trying out different recordings, looking for the ones that will make her feel the way she felt when he sang them.

None of them quite work, and she forgets about it for a while, but a few years later on the Enterprise she’s taking some of the school children on a field trip to the shuttle bay when the red alert sounds.

‘Who can tell me where the nearest designated shelter area is?’ she asks.

She’s already leading them towards it, but the question distracts them from their fear long enough for her to get them there. It’s not much more than a bolthole with access to an escape pod, but they scramble inside and make themselves as comfortable as they can.

Deanna taps her combadge, and it makes the dead-sounding chirp that indicates a fault with the communications systems. The status display in the corner of the room doesn’t give her much more useful information. There’s no way of telling how long they’ll be in here. The children’s fear is growing, prickling the back of her neck.

‘There’s no need to worry,’ she tells them. ‘We won’t be here very long. What shall we do to pass the time?’

And that’s when the songs come back to her. First she teaches them She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain, because it’s easy to pick up and they like getting faster and faster with each verse. Some of them already know some of the lyrics to Clementine, so they try that next, and she pushes them louder to drown out the sounds of the ship shuddering around them. She picks the funny songs, the fast ones, the ones with actions that go with them, and when there are eighty-two bottles of beer on the wall, the all-clear sounds.

She hears the songs around the ship for weeks after that, and it makes her smile every time.

* * *

It was her father’s memory that made her determined to join Starfleet, but often she thinks that the traits she inherited from her mother have let her thrive there.

It’s certainly her untapped wellspring of Fifth House imperiousness that helps her when she’s forced to become Major Rakal of the Tal Shiar. She thinks of Lwaxana and walks like she owns the ship, talks like she expects everyone to do her bidding, dares them to defy her. She more or less pulls it off, too.

When she’s back in her own skin, her own familiar face looking back at her in the mirror, her insides still itch with the memory of it. She’s sensed people’s fear and hatred plenty of times, but never like this. The crew’s loathing wasn’t really meant for her but it rolls around her head anyway, mixed up with the knowledge of the eighteen people on the freighter that N’Vek destroyed because of her.

It’s her father’s stories she dives into for comfort. On Beverly’s advice she takes a few days off, and she spends them reading through the computer’s entire database of Ancient West stories, one after another without stopping. For a few days the only way she can sleep is with the computer reading them aloud to her, blocking out the other thoughts, the words jumbling together as she drifts off.

* * *

‘Deanna, take the helm!’ Will yells over the noise. ‘Get us out of orbit!’

And she does, she pilots the ship all through the battle, evading fire from the Klingon ship, coordinating with Worf at tactical so that their own weapons are in the right places at the right times, compensating for the places where the shields are weak.

She’s never done this before, not for real. She’s taken the helm plenty of times, and she’s been in battle simulations in the holodeck - she knows what to do, knows she can do it. But now her heartbeat is a rapid drumming, her mental shields are taut against the fear and unease of a thousand people, her fingers on the console are sweating as the environmental controls struggle.

And suddenly she thinks her father is there.

It's not his presence exactly - more like a feeling of surety that's so strongly associated with the memory of him that it might as well be his hand on her shoulder, his voice in her ear.

Later she decides that it’s probably just because, when she was a little girl, this was how she imagined her father when he was away - fighting Klingons, having adventures. When at five years old she decided to follow him into Starfleet, this was the future she was picturing for herself.

Whatever it is, it makes her hands sure on the controls, her breathing steady as the giant of a ship responds to her commands.

When the battle is over and they hurtle towards the surface of the planet, the helm controls useless now, she thinks about how he died in the line of duty, and she thinks about how much she has loved this life, this ship and this crew, and that maybe it’s not so terrible if she does the same.

* * *

‘Aw, shit,’ says Zefram Cochrane, looking up from the diagram he’s studying. ‘I just realised. We can’t go ahead with the launch.’

‘What’s the problem now?’ Will asks. They’ve only just talked him around to the idea again.

‘Eddie,’ says Cochrane. ‘He was killed in the attack, he was supposed to run ground control. There’s nobody else to do it.’

He’s matter-of-fact, but Deanna senses the sadness he’s squashing down. She gives his hand a quick squeeze and he half-smiles.

‘Dr Cochrane, we’re sorry for your loss,’ Will says, ‘but we really need this launch to go ahead. Did Eddie have any notes, any instructions...?’

‘Yeah, Lily wrote down everything he’d need to do, but...’

‘Deanna can do it,’ says Will. ‘She’s a quick study.’

And just like that, she’s in charge of ground control at first contact. Not only is she going to be there for one of the most important moments in Earth history, she’s going to actually take part.

First contact is a thing that trips her up. For years it meant Betazed’s first contact with the Bajorans, some two centuries before the Vulcans ever showed up on Earth. Then she took a Federation History class at the Academy, and noticed the way everyone talked like there was only ever one first contact that happened in the entire history of the Federation and its member worlds.

She has to admit, though, that this feels pretty momentous - getting to read the actual Lily Sloane’s actual - handwritten! - notes on the Phoenix, her scribbles and her precise little diagrams, her detailed checklists. She goes over everything, tests the equipment in the control room, runs through the lists twice to be sure.

And while she does it she thinks about how, somewhere out there, somewhere on this small, frightened planet, are her own ancestors. She has no idea who or where they are, or what they might be doing right now, but she knows that their lives are about to change. All of this - Zefram Cochrane, the Phoenix, the Vulcans - is leading someday to her father, tall and smiling in his Starfleet uniform, holding her up to the window to look at the stars.

‘Control to Phoenix,’ she says. ‘The final launch sequence checks are complete. Good luck.’

She counts down to zero and the Phoenix blasts up to the sky and into history. A little piece of her heart goes with it.


End file.
